1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to communications and, more particularly, to communications patch panels.
2. Related Art
Wired line communications involves modulating signals over wires. In a given conventional office building having several hundred offices, often as many as two to three communication wires may be run from each office to a wiring closet. In some cases a building may have a wiring closet on each floor and then the wiring closets may run communications wires vertically through a backbone to a floor housing a datacenter and/or a private branch exchange (PBX). Thus, telephone twisted pair wiring, as well as local area network (LAN) data wiring such as, e.g., but not limited to, Ethernet wiring, may be run from each office back to a wiring closet. A patch panel is a device conventionally used to organize the potentially hundreds of wires, cable, or twisted pair. The patch panel may conventionally be used to easily connect customer premises wiring to customer premises equipment (CPE). The patch panel may conventionally be used as a central point of termination of wiring. Patch panels conventionally permit manual or semi-manual connection of equipment such as, e.g., but not limited to, a PBX, or a computer server to devices such as, e.g., but not limited to, telephones (such as digital and/or analog), or workstation client computers on a local area network. Some patch panels allow patch cords to be used to couple together different devices connected to a patch panel. Unfortunately, when using a large number of patch cords, it can become very difficult to identify the initiating and terminating ends of a particular patch cord. What is needed then is an improved way to identify the ports associated with initiating and terminating ends of patch cords in a wired patch panel, which overcomes this and other shortcomings of conventional patch panels.